After killing Jason off and countless screaming Argonauts

[sovay]

I went to bed early last night. I was not feeling fantastic; I made an effort to get some rest. And instead I had one of those experiences where you hit dream sleep immediately and then wake up and feel like a bus just ran over your brain. In this case, I dreamed there was a plague. It was characterized as such in the dream, not a pandemic or an epidemic, but a pestilence, something millenarian, a destroying angel. I had taken refuge in a subway station with a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty people—as though a virus could be sheltered from like the Blitz—some of whom were strangers, many of whom were my family. There were little camps down the tunnels, pallets and fires. I remember a small child in a smoke-stained fireman's helmet, salvaged as we fled. But no one from my real life, although they do turn up sometimes in my dreams; we were all intermarried dynastically, like pharaohs, and enough of us had already died that we were beginning to worry about making matches for the next generation, carrying on the right bloodlines. At least the most important pair were untouched, the man whose role was closest in this world to a sacred king, although mostly he looked rumpled and middle-aged and desperately afraid for the rest of his family, and the thing that was the other half of holiness, submerged behind glass in a silvery liquid that slapped and broke far too thinly for water. I do not remember if this was its natural environment or some precaution against the plague, but I remember how many arms it had, the color of ambergris, jointed like a crab’s legs and very soft to touch, and I remember that most of its eyes were centered at the flower where they joined. Toward the end of the dream, he was leaning up against its tank with at least one of its limbs folded across his chest and both his arms wrapped around it, holding on for dear life and shamefaced because he felt he had no right to comfort when so many people were dying around him. No one would have criticized him. They were the pair that kept everything going, the engines of the sun and moon, and if one of them had died, we might as well all have gone up and wandered around until we coughed our lives out on the deserted streets. And the last thing I dreamed was standing on the steps that led down to the turnstiles, looking at the two of them. Will the Sirenia Players please answer the phone next time? I cannot keep taking your calls.

Comments

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

Your dreams are amazing, always. Do you know what prompted this one? They should run a 24-hour broadcast of all the images that play through your mind. What a visual delight--not necessarily comfortable or comforting, but always exotic and stimulating.

[sovay]

Do you know what prompted this one?

I have no idea. Usually it takes me at least an hour to fall asleep; this time I crashed instantly and woke up less than half an hour later with this dream. I wrote it down before I forgot it; I went back to sleep and I don't remember the rest of my dreams. The last thing I read before bed was Le Guin's Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (1996), which is mostly realist.

They should run a 24-hour broadcast of all the images that play through your mind.

I wish I felt I could do justice to more of them . . .

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wow, I can just see the poor, middle-aged king, holding on to the crab thing in its glass container, and it holding on to him.

[sovay]

Wow, I can just see the poor, middle-aged king, holding on to the crab thing in its glass container, and it holding on to him.

It's a story I wish I could do more with . . .

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

There's love and attachment there, for sure--like something entrusted, and a desperate desire not to break the trust.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Will the Sirenia Players please answer the phone next time? I cannot keep taking your calls.

And what a call it was.

[sovay]

And what a call it was.

I know; I don't really want to complain to the phone company . . .

[lesser-celery.livejournal.com]

Now that's a first-class plague dream. And it's not at all what the CDC, in its poetic way, would call "community mitigation."

[sovay]

Now that's a first-class plague dream.

I transitively blame you.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

My, that's... very striking. Although I'm sorry it caused you to feel as if a bus had run over your brain.

[sovay]

Although I'm sorry it caused you to feel as if a bus had run over your brain.

It was more the twenty minutes of instant REM followed by an equally abrupt crash back to awareness that left me with a lingering sensation of bus. I'm sorrier than I can't remember more of the dream.

[chomiji]

>> ... shamefaced because he felt he had no right to comfort when so many people were dying around him. <<

Aww ... . Of all the striking things about this, that was, for some reason, the one that hit hardest.

[genarti]

For me, too.

[chomiji]

Is your icon text from Paul Simon's "Only Living Boy in New York"?

[genarti]

It is indeed!

I didn't make it, though I'd love to claim I had; it's from this lovely post over at obsessiveicons.

[sovay]

Of all the striking things about this, that was, for some reason, the one that hit hardest.

It's the image I remembered.

[sovay]

I posted a while back on a dream interpretation site - does the methodology give you any insight?

I don't tend to analyze my dreams formally; I am more interested in whether they will turn into stories or poems. But I approve of your icon.